The musings, moans, groans, grumbles and occasional lucid thoughts of an English solicitor-advocate specialising in motoring law at www.londondrinkdrivingsolicitor.co.uk

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

The sin of poverty we do disdain

Morpeth Street Coronation Street Party

I went to see my parents yesterday; they don’t often talk
about their childhoods but yesterday my mum told me about the death of her Nan
and a time when one of her elder brother had pneumonia.

As a child, my mum lived in a condemned slum dwelling in
east London where I’m told that the ground floor lacked floorboards and was
uninhabitable. A couple of years ago my
uncle (who is about 15 years older than my mum) told me that he was ashamed to
live there and despised the acceptance of the conditions they lived in by those
around him.

It was in those conditions just prior to the beginnings
of the NHS that my great-grandmother fell ill.
There was no NHS to help her and the family could not afford to pay a
doctor. They were fortunate that the
Whitechapel hospital was very charitable and doctors could be found to tend to
the sick. A doctor duly visited my
great-grandmother at the family home and promised to do anything he could to
help her.

The doctor left to go about his work; he’d
been gone less than five minutes when my great-grandmother died.

Had there been access to proper housing, GPs and other
medical help then who knows whether she might have lived longer?

The other story was very similar – her older brother
contracted pneumonia as a child; there was no NHS to turn to and the family could
not afford to pay a doctor. This time
there were no charitable doctors willing or able to give their time to treat a
seriously ill child. Fortunately, he
lived – but imagine being a mum or dad, having a very ill child, knowing he
might die and that there are doctors nearby who can help him but not having the
money to pay for that help. This is in
living memory, in the capital city of the UK not in some two-bit former-colony... yes USA I am looking at you!

For all their talk of praising the NHS and keeping
services free at the point of use, politicians are failing to protect a vital
service to which a lot of citizens in other countries would love to have
access. Yes, yes, I can hear the cynics
already simultaneously decrying the claim that other countries envy our NHS while
grumbling about all those foreigners coming over here to use our free NHS and
failing to grasp the contradiction there. I suggest many in the USA would love a fairer
system, such as the thousands who lined up for days to access a range of free medical services, including childhood immunisations that could save the life of a kid and that
we take for granted. Incidentally, health insurance for a family in 2009 cost an average of

It is quite possible and even probably that the rich pay more to fund the NHS than they would do under a wholly privatised system. To them I say, so what? Nobody likes giving away their money but the alternative is a return to the previous system where those who can pay live and those who cannot die. We, as a society, need people to do low-paid work because some jobs need to be done and are never going to pay a huge amount of money. The least a society can do is look after those who need help in moments of crisis.

UKIP say they would keep the NHS free at the point of use
but read the small print and they want us to have a health service like Austria,
where the overwhelming majority of care is privately funded. Thus leaving the potential for unmet need for
many of the poorest in society and adding additional financial pressure on
hard-working families who need to pay for medical insurance.

Labour began the process of privatisation, which is now
being taken forward at speed by the Tories.
I don’t have a problem with commercial companies making a profit (not
even a big profit… or even a fucking massive profit) if they are acting fairly
and lawfully but I do have a problem with the privatisation of public services. It just never goes well. The railways are an expensive, complicated
nightmare (e.g. a season ticket on the train would cost me £518 per month compared
to £265.67 per month to drive, which includes insurance, road tax, petrol and purchase
price of my motorbike). Government IT
system fuck-ups are too numerous to mention, the court interpreters contract
was an expensive mess as was the Defence Solicitor Call Centre. Don't get me started on the expensive waste that is the PFI scheme. And just think what happened when the LAPD was
privatised in RoboCop!

As for the Liberal Democrats, well I voted for them last
time and I’m not doing that again!

All too frequently at the moment poverty is something to be disdained by the political classes and to be poor is equated with being unmeritorious in some way - TV shows like Benefit Street and How to Get a Council House depict the poor as scrounging layabouts or members of the criminal classes. Politicians and others talk in ways that suggest poverty is a sin or even that those claiming to be too poor to feed themselves are simply liars on the scrounge for a free dinner.

What is the point of this post? I don’t really know – maybe it’s a chance for
me to moan about politicians or maybe it’s a chance to share a story to remind
people that going back to a time without a path from cradle to grave is a horrific thought. Maybe it’s just the fact that as I type this
post Billy Bragg is blaring out of my stereo:

About Me

I am a solicitor-advocate who specialises in motoring law with a particular interest in representing clients who have been charged with criminal driving offences involving alcohol, such as drink driving and failing to provide a specimen of breath.